Cherry blossoms against a cloudy sky.

The space to the right of the front stairs is complicated. If it was just a rectangular patch of ground, I’d have no trouble filling it – a few bushes, ground cover under them, perennials between and in front, maybe some spring-flowering bulbs here and there. But there is the access hatch to the crawlspace under the house, to begin with. We don’t need to get in there often, but we also cannot block it off completely. And there is the water tap, which needs to be even more accessible.

Ideally I’d have have something pretty and green growing in the entire space. But I don’t know of any shade-tolerant ground cover that would stand up to frequent trampling, so for the sake of practicality I’m putting paving stones in the parts where I think we’ll want to walk the most. Wall-to-wall (that is, house wall to retaining wall) in front of the tap, and a shallower bit in front of the hatch, that I’ll hide behind some greenery. To keep the overall impression natural, rather than sleek and paved, I’m leaving gaps here and there between the stones to fill in with ground covering plants.

Laying out irregularly shaped paving stones in an aesthetically pleasing way is hard. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with no right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, where each piece weighs several kilos. The balance between “pleasantly irregular” and “sloppy” was tricky. It took me three hours of work, and I was knackered by the end of it.

Bushes and perennials that take a long time to wake in spring make me anxious. The buds on some bushes are barely visible, while others have new leaves the size of a finger joint. Some perennials are already knee-high, but others haven’t even broken through the crust of the soil. It makes me worry that maybe they’ve died over the winter.

In my eternal project of removing lawn and replacing it with better things, I’ve now tackled the bit just in front of the house, to the right of the stairs. It’s a hassle to mow, with rocks peeking out of the ground along the edges as well as a large rock just at the corner. And it’s really boring to look at. For a spot that we walk past every time we come home, it really isn’t well utilized.

First step: remove the lawn. I was expecting this to be relatively arduous, based on past experience. The soil here turned out to be light and dry, not at all like the clay to the left of the stairs, and the grass is thin and weak. So I got all this done much faster than I had thought.

Next step: figure out what to plant. I had this spot marked as deep shade in my head, but it was full sun while I was digging this afternoon. But of course that’s because the cherry tree is bare right now, and will change in just a few weeks.

Bought and planted some spring flowers for the porch, for the first time in several years, in yet another step to getting back to the way life used to be.

The first truly warm day this spring. Short sleeves, sandals, and lunch out in the sun. And several hours of spring cleaning in the garden.

Spring is not complete without a photo of Viburnum flowers.

This is the season when not a day goes by without me passing some part of the garden and being amazed about all the beautiful things emerging there. Truly the best time of the year.

Every spring, for about a week or two, we get ants in the house. They wake up because it’s spring, but don’t quite find enough food outside yet, so they come in to look for more. As soon as the ground comes to life with whatever they eat, they leave our kitchen alone again.

During that week or two, though, they can be quite annoying. We have to make sure to not leave any overripe fruit in the fruit bowl, and to keep the food compost inaccessible.

I’m pretty inured to the ants and just squish them when I find them and flush them down the drain. The kids both find the ants kind of disgusting, and complain a bit. And then one of them leaves half an apple on the kitchen counter, and is surprised when there are more ants the next morning. It’s like they sometimes just turn off their logical thinking abilities.

The pink shoots of bleeding hearts.